BS (Utah), MA, MS, PhD (Glasgow)

The main goal of my education and research is to develop an understanding of how knowledge might be represented in the brain.

"Really massive modularity is a coherent account of cognitive architecture only if the input problem for each module (the problem of identifying representations in its proprietary domain) can be solved by inferences that aren't abductive (or otherwise holistic); that is by domain-specific mechanisms." - Jerry Fodor (p. 78, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way)

About Me

I am currently looking to expand my career by working in industry. I plan to continue my research in clinical NLP with an eye toward incorporating more cognitive modeling. My training is in Psychology and Computer Science. My consistent aim has been to construct models of cognition to aid in the understanding human function and in the development of machine intelligence. I have been pursuing these lines of inquiry since I was an undergraduate. My Master’s thesis in 1990 investigated a technique to facilitate learning in artificial neural networks. Since that time I have periodically updated my understanding of neuroscience, with an fMRI project in 2005, and computer science, with a new degree in 2009.

To build on my previous work, I want to take a page from computer vision systems and apply it to clinical text processing. I plan to create a hierarchical system, which begins with attentional mechanisms and ends with a representation of the ontologic entities referred to in the text.

For the past 2 years I lectured in psychology (Introductory, Cognition), computer science (Introductory- Java, Machine Learning), and Research Design and Statistics at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

My most recent research has been as a consultant in qualitative methods and ontology development with Dr. Charlene Weir in the Univesity of Utah Biomedical Informatics department. We are creating an ontology of patient frailty indications. The goal of the project is to automatically rank patient records for frailty with respect to cardiac interventions.

Until October 2015, I was working as a Research Scientist with Dr. John Hurdle on the POET2 research project in Biomedical Informatics.